Alan Turing & the Turing Test

Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician. He is known to be the father of computer science as we know it today. He invented the Turing machine in 1936. So, what is the Turing machine? The Turing machine is a mathematical model of a computing machine, which uses a predetermined set of rules to output a result after certain variables are inputted. The Turing machine was ultimately used to solve problems in the world of computing. After doing a little research I found that the Turing machine was used by the UK and its allies to read German intelligence, which I found very interesting. Through the development of the Turing machine, Alan Turing found that certain issues were not able to be solved by a simple algorithm. This lead him to believe that there was a limit to the power of computation. He called this the Church-Turing thesis. The Church-Turing thesis states that any function of numbers can be calculated, but only if the Turing Machine can actually follow through and compute a result. By 1950, Alan Turing created the Turing test, which had originally been known as the imitation game. This test was created to test a machine’s ability to express intelligent human-like behavior. The test is tricky because you have to dig deep to really understand if it is an AI or a human you are chatting with.No computer has ever passed a Turing test since all AI is still only general intelligence. General intelligence means that they are not smarter than any human and cannot replicate the emotions and feelings that a human does endure. The image below is a Turing machine, which is now stored at the National Museum of Computing.